Comey Presser in Hindsight

Remember last year’s July 5 press conference in which FBI Director James Comey dropped all charges against Hillary Clinton in her email scandal? It was a shocking development.
CNN reported:

FBI Director James Comey said Tuesday that he would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton over her use of private email servers while secretary of state, removing a huge shadow hovering over her presidential campaign.
But Comey administered an extraordinary tongue-lashing to Clinton and her aides, rebuking them for being “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information and saying the presumptive Democratic nominee should have known an unclassified email system was no place to conduct sensitive government business.
The FBI director pointed out that the probe was tasked with examining whether Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way.

“Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey announced after a lengthy recap of the investigation apparently designed to protect the integrity of his agency in a highly charged political atmosphere.
Comey’s decision not to recommend charges likely removes the threat of prosecution in the middle of Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, but the political fallout will continue.

Certainly the last part of that is true.

But looking at it in hindsight, didn’t he do the same thing she did? Sundance at Conservative Treehouse finds “The defensive narrative ‘fact pattern’ appears identical in sequencing:

Step 1 – The emails/memos were not classified. √

Step 2 – The emails/memos were not ‘marked’ classified. √

Step 3 – The emails/memos were ‘retroactively classified‘. √”

I do believe that Comey thought Clinton would win. But just in case and if anyone ever looked into his dealings, he set a precedent for law enforcement by not prosecuting for something that was clearly illegal.

Comey strikes me as the kind of guy who thinks night and day about protecting himself and covering his tracks. Guess you don’t get to rise to the level of FBI Director without doing so.

Rumors are that Robert Mueller has granted him immunity in this Russian probe. That’s one FBI Director protecting another, isn’t it?